Driven by the ongoing digital initiatives by the Indian government and a surge in the use of digital technologies due to COVID-19, more than 50% of enterprises* in India have significantly increased their ICT budget in 2022 compared to 2021, reveals GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.
GlobalData’s India enterprise ICT investment trends report, which is based on the company’s recent ICT Customer Insight Survey, about 56% of the respondents who are key IT decision makers in enterprises covered in the survey for the country, have claimed that there has been a significant (greater than 6%) increase in their enterprise ICT budget for 2022 compared to 2021 while another 34.5% have claimed there has been a slight (1% to 6%) increase in the same.
Pragyan Tarasia, Technology Analyst at GlobalData, says: “The optimistic enterprise ICT spending outlook in India for 2022 can most likely be attributed to the growing focus on technology-led investment towards digital transformation activities like cloud migration, automation, and upgrading of legacy IT infrastructure along with favorable government policies. Furthermore, large scale enterprises and SMEs across India are progressively changing their business models to deliver digital-first experience.”
The report also analyses the enterprise investment priorities across 30+ IT solution areas and reveals that cloud computing is one of the top investment areas for 2022. Cloud computing is becoming an integral part of enterprises across all sectors in India including BFSI, retail, healthcare, education, and telecom, as it builds business resilience, accelerates innovation, and optimizes costs.
As a result, enterprises in India are prioritizing their investment on cloud computing implementation models. This is validated in the GlobalData’s survey, where more than 65% of the surveyed respondents have claimed that their individual private cloud, hybrid cloud, managed cloud service, IaaS, SaaS and PaaS budget allocation towards cloud computing has increased in 2022 compared with 2021.
Tarasia adds: “The thrust towards Digital India by the Government of India to support eGovernance initiatives and think-tank Niti Aayog’s vision of AI-led economy is also one of the key reasons for an increased focus on cloud computing among enterprises in India. As the demand for cloud computing grows, government initiatives such as the acceleration of e-services delivery through GI Cloud (MeghRaj) and the development of a cloud-based AI platform called AIRAWAT are facilitating cloud boom in the country. Moreover, with cloud computing becoming the launchpad for digital transformation, enterprises are investing on cloud infrastructure for faster access to technologies, efficient application development and secured business.”
However, with the growing digitization of businesses cybersecurity has also now become a key enterprise concern, thus stimulating increased investment on IT security hardware, software, and services for the next two years.
For instance, more than 80% respondents in India* have claimed that their enterprises are prioritizing their ICT investment in identity and access management, data protection/security, fraud prevention and transactional security, and security intelligence and management software for investment in next two years.
Tarasia concludes: “Other than traditional IT solution areas, disruptive technologies are also finding a lot of attention among the enterprises in India. A significant proportion of enterprises in India are emphasizing on utilizing disruptive technologies for digital transformation as indicated by the survey results, where over 60% of the respondents from the country indicate that their enterprise ICT budget allocation for disruptive technologies has increased in 2022 over 2021 with edge computing and artificial intelligence proving to be the most popular investment areas.”
